Are women in politics still routinely demeaned in the news media, or is it all about Sarah Palin (see this in Vanity Fair and this about who said it.)?

July 1, 2009

The question I raise today deserves some elaboration. It’s mostly about media standards and smears. Specifically, in this case, it’s about publishing demeaning and damaging assessments—in this case of Sarah Palin--that reportedly came from the mouths (or minds, it’s hard to tell) of others, none of whom are identified.

The Vanity Fair article in question includes this line: “All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression?”

As far as I can tell, the article does not identify one aide, let alone multiple aides, who worried about Palin's mental state or include any quote or quotes anonymous or otherwise, in which people say they worried about Palin’s mental state or asking whether it was “possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression.”

The practice of enshrouding defamation in a cloak of anonymous others is distressingly common. The common defense is: "I never said X is mentally unstable. I said others were worrying about whether X was mentally unstable." Yet the effect is to place the defamation in the public domain.

Curiously, the same article, which includes no campaign aides talking candidly, nevertheless announces that now, “top campaign officials talk more candidly than ever before” about Palin.

But even if it had contained the proverbial "anonymous quote," that would not elevate it. It's still improper journalistically to let someone declare anonymously that, say, "I worry about Fred Barbash's mental state."

The reference to postpartum depression prompts the gender question, of course, which is anticipated by the author in this passage: “Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs.”

To me, the article raises more questions about the “mental state” of the unidentified “top campaign officials” than it does about Palin’s mental state. If they were in fact genuinely worried about the “mental state” of the person who would, possibly, become chief-of-state, then we are in quite a state.